Cabécar people
| Total population | |
|---|---|
| 17,000 | |
| Regions with significant populations | |
 Costa Rica
|
|
| Languages | |
| Cabécar, Spanish | |
| Related ethnic groups | |
| Bribri |
The Cabécar are an indigenous group of the remote Talamanca region of eastern Costa Rica. They speak Cabécar, a language belonging to the Chibchan language family of the Isthmo-Colombian Area of lower Central America and northwestern Colombia. According to census data from the National Institute of Statistics and Census of Costa Rica (Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Censos, INEC), the Cabécar are the largest indigenous group in Costa Rica with a population of nearly 17,000.
Cabécar territory extends northwest from the Río Coen to the Río Reventazón. Many Cabécar settlements today are located inside reserves established by Costa Rican law in 1976 to protect indigenous ancestral homelands. These reserves exhibit ecological diversity, including vast swaths of tropical rainforest covering steep escarpments and large river valleys where many Cabécar still employ traditional subsistence livelihoods and cultural practices.
Cabécar is one of sixteen remaining languages in the Chibchan language family of the Isthmo-Colombian Area, a region of southern Central America (specifically eastern Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama) and northwestern Colombia bifurcating the areas of Mesoamerican and South American linguistic traditions. The extensive geographic distribution of the Chibchan language family has sparked debate among scholars regarding the origin and diffusion of Chibchan languages. Two conceptual models have emerged to describe possible scenarios: the Theory of North Migration and the Centrifugal Expansion Theory. The former postulates Colombia as the historical epicenter from which Chibchan linguistic groups migrated northwestward into present-day Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Honduras. However, anthropological and archaeological evidence (see Cooke and Ranere 1992; Fonseca and Cooke 1993; Fonseca 1994), combined with studies (see Constenla 1981, 1985, 1989, 1991, 1995), prefer the Centrifugal Expansion Theory suggesting that Chibchan-speaking groups developed in-situ over a long period of time from an origin at the Talamanca mountain range of present-day Costa Rica and Panama. From there, Chibchan linguistic groups migrated and settled as far north as eastern Honduras and as far south as Colombia.
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